In case you missed it: November on Planet Hugill - Mavra, Iolanta and Simplicius Simplicissimus

Welcome
to November on Planet Hugill, a month when rare opera seemed to be
particularly to the fore. At the Guildhall School of Music & Drama
there was a double bill of Stravinsky's Mavra and Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, whilst the first UK staging of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Simplicius Simplicissimus
from Independent Opera at Sadler's Wells made for thrilling yet
disturbing theatre. Less rare but no less welcome was the elegance and
anxiety of Der Rosenkavalier at Opera North, conducted by the company's new musical director Aleksandar Markovic.

Brighton Early Music Festival

Wigmore Hall

Simone Piazzola
gave us a climax really worth waiting for at Rosenblatt Recitals, and
we celebrated 20 years with Samling Artists new and old celebrate with The Seven Ages of Man. There was a highly theatrical & musical performance of Cavalli's La Calisto from La Nuova Musica.

Various Venues

In All Blood Runs Red, London Song Festival explored composers and poets from World War One, and the City Bach Collective
celebrated 40 years of Bach cantatas in the City at the church of St
Mary at Hill. There was beautifully musical account of Handel's Serse from the Early Opera Company at St John's Smith Square and a radical re-invention of the concert format in Joyce DiDonato's In War and Peace at the Barbican.

From our correspondent

Ruth went to two events at a weekend of exceedingly good taste at Kings Place. There was lots of taste but not much excess in music for Louis XIV, but the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier was the starting point for a concert of rare treats from Eamonn Dougan & friends.

Features and Interviews

▪ From Tom & Jerry to Madama Butterfly and beyond, I chat to conductor John Wilson.▪ Goehr, Knussen, Pelleas & more: I chat to conductor Jonathan Berman before his Ensemble Modern debut.▪ Infinite variety: I chat to Anneke Scott about the French horn.▪ From social realism to fairy tale: the background to Rimsky Korsakov's opera The Snow Maiden.▪ An important waypoint in British operatic history: Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers.

And Elsewhere

I spent a lovely couple of days
in Suffolk recording my songs with William Vann (piano), Anna Huntley
(mezzo-soprano), Rosalind Ventris (viola) and Johnny Herford (baritone)
for a disc to be released on the Navona label next year.

And on December 8, London Concord Singers, conductor Jessica Norton, celebrates its 50th anniversary with a concert
at the Priory Church of the Order of St John in Clerkenwell, with a
programme including world premieres of pieces by myself, Jessica Norton
and Alison Willis.

Quickening:

Songs by Robert Hugill to texts by English and Welsh poets now available from Amazon

four delicate, sensitive settings of Ivor Gurney, drawing performances of like quality. - it is Rosalind Ventris’s viola, weaving its way around and between the voice and William Vann’s piano, that is most beguilingGramphone magazine Jan 2018